The island is named for the Arctic explorer Robert Bylot, who was the first European to sight it in 1616.[2] The whaling captain William Adams was the first to prove the island's insular nature in 1872.[3]
In the 2000s, Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation, began to develop a tote road from its Mary River Mine, and harbour infrastructure in Milne Bay—a small, shallow arm of at the confluence of Eclipse Sound and Navy Board Inlet which separates Bylot Island from Baffin Island.[4][5] Milne Inlet flows in a southerly direction from Navy Board Inlet at the confluence of Eclipse Sound.
In 2010, a painting of Bylot Island titled "Bylot Island I" by Lawren Harris, one of the Group of Seven mid-century Canadian artists, was sold at auction for $2.8 million, one of the highest prices ever paid for a work by a Canadian artist.[9]
"The Mothership", a 5 km-wide (3-mile) wide terminal lobe of a glacier flowing down from the interior ice cap on top of the Byam Martin Mountains. Note the dramatic terminal moraine "bulldozed" at the ice front.
Audet, Benoît; Gauthier, Gilles; and Lévesque, Esther (2007); "Feeding Ecology of Greater Snow Goose Goslings in Mesic Tundra on Bylot Island, Nunavut, Canada", The Condor. 109, no. 2: 361
Drury, W. H.; and Drury, Mary B.; The Bylot Island Expedition, [Lincoln, Mass.]: Massachusetts Audubon Society, 1955
Falconer, G.; Glaciers of Northern Baffin and Bylot Islands, NWT, Ottawa: Geographical Branch, Dept. of Mines and Technical Surveys, 1962
Fortier, Daniel; Allard, Michel; and Shur, Yuri (2007); "Observation of Rapid Drainage System Development by Thermal Erosion of Ice Wedges on Bylot Island, Arctic Archipelago", Permafrost and Periglacial Processes, 18, no. 3: 229
Hofmann, H. J.; and Jackson, G. D.; Shale-Facies Microfossils from the Proterozoic Bylot Supergroup, Baffin Island, Canada. [Tulsa, OK]: Paleontological Society, 1994